Garden Tips for the Hare-ied

It's the time of year when I gaze out onto my small vegetable garden and think, "What will I kill this year?" My little patch is pretty lame, compared to the verdant garden of my childhood. But it's not my fault; we had a secret weapon back then, one that I only fully appreciate now. 

I speak, of course, of the Davis Family Rabbits. 

When my older sister Sally got the first black and white Dutch rabbit – Powder, called Powdy for short – back in the early 1970s, we needed to keep them protected from upstate New York winters so harsh they used to make board games about them. (What? You didn't grow up playing "Blizzard of '77"?)

So Dad, an engineer and tinkerer extraordinaire, constructed a rabbit run from two by fours and metal mesh that ran the entire width of one of the garages, tucked right up against the cement wall. A divider in the middle made it possible for us to house more than one rabbit at a time, and each side of the hutch had a plywood box for bunny privacy. Eventually Powdy moved on and Daisy and Indy moved in, each taking their own studio apartment.

Underneath the whole kit and caboodle were The Trays. These were three sheet metal trays fabricated especially for us by a friend of Dad’s from Kodak, or maybe from golf, or from the Volunteer Fire Department. They were each about 5 feet long, three feet wide, and had a lip an inch high. Each Tray weighed about 40 pounds empty. Bunny business dropped through the straw-covered mesh into The Trays, and every couple of weeks we had to slide them out, carry them into the vegetable garden, and dump them.

Carrying the heavy, goop filled trays required extreme precision if you didn’t want their contents dribbling onto you like a bad horror movie effect. As the youngest and shortest child, I dreaded cleaning the rabbit cage. All my brother or sister had to do was shrug their shoulders an inch so their Tray end rose up, and it was all over for me. Hands, cuffs, shoes, legs – at some point every part of me has been hit by rabbit pee, much to the amusement of my family members. You'd almost think they did it to me on purpose.

On the plus side was the fact that over the years, our vegetable garden plot was so fertile that if you threw a seed in, it bloomed before it landed. We grew zucchini the size of those yellow bananas that tourists ride through tropical waters behind speedboats. Tomatoes like melons. Melons like basketballs.

I think that the secret to the Davis rabbit poop fertilizer was a practice that, in retrospect, seems like one of those things that could only have happened during the '70s, like kids flying around car backseats without seatbelts, or an African Print 70's pantsuit. See, we regularly asphyxiated the rabbits with gas fumes.

Yes, they were kept warm in the garage, but a lot of that warmth came from a Buick station wagon tailpipe that stood about 18 inches away from the hutch. Particularly in the winter, when it was de rigueur to run the car engine in the closed garage for 10 minutes to warm it up before Dad left for Kodak Park, those rabbits got a nice healthy dose of carbon monoxide poisoning each morning.

On the surface, I know, that sounds awful. But maybe it was the CO poisoning that accounted for the rabbits' freakishly long lifespan. The average rabbit lives 7-12 years. When Indy, the last survivor, was 12 years old, I left for college, my parents’ empty nest technically still occupied by rabbits. Freshman year, sophomore year, junior year – my weekly phone calls home inevitably ended with my dad saying, “And the goddamned rabbit is still alive.” My sister even remembers an inquiry from the University of Rochester, a scientist who wanted to examine our elderly rabbit, but I think she may have dreamt that. At any rate, when Indy finally died, my dad had the cage removed and dismantled before you can say "Watership Down."

Our neighbors now have a rabbit who is the sweetest being ever. I could ask them for bunny poop for the garden. But without the tailpipe emissions, I'm just not sure it would be the same.

Vegetable Garden and the June Gloom

Despite the fact that we haven't seen more than an hour of sun each day since June 1 - the fog just doesn't lift anymore - the veggie garden is doing ok and remains deer free. Thought I'd post a couple shots of the garden in its shivering state, so that sometime in July or August when it's full and lush I'll have a basis for comparison.

You say repellant, I say eau de parfum

I've written about my fabulous new flower garden that was the birthday present from my green-thumbed friend Andrea. It's filling in so nicely, I'll post another picture in a week or two or when the sun comes out, whatever comes first.

There is actually another garden that I'm cultivating too, a raised bed at the front of the house that was filled with flowering bushes when we first moved in. About three years ago the girls and I made our first tentative attempt at vegetable gardening, ripping out a bush and putting in a tomato plant, and voila! Maddy's love of tomatoes was born. Anxious to underpin ANY broadening of her palate, we have added a few things each year.

Finally this year enough was enough, and we ripped out EVERYTHING from the bed, including daffodil bulbs, that wasn't vegetables. I amended the soil a bunch and by the end of April we had a nice neat bed going: tomatoes, beans, carrots, basil, artichokes, sunflower, strawberries, and squash, plus a bunch of other random pretty herbs.

Things were going along swimmingly until Saturday morning, when we awoke to find that some creature had eaten: tomatoes, beans, and squash. All gone, down to their little stubs. Agh! Ran up to Thornhill Nursery and described the damage, and the diagnosis was deer. We may live in the mean streets of Oakland, but it's deer paradise as any rose grower will tell you.

Rather than buying the 8-foot long "lodge poles" and deer netting which would have required a whole lot of money and talent we don't have, we went for "Deer Scram." This is a powdery substance that looks like dirt but contains blood, bone meal, garlic and cloves. Stinky and gross, the theory is that it activates the deer's instinct to not eat in an area where something has died. We shook a huge border of the stuff around the garden and so far, the deer have stayed away.

The problem is, of course, the dog. He is entirely unable to resist it..if the front door is open even a crack he races to the garden and starts gobbling as fast as he can, and then sneezing as the garlic and cloves hit him. So in order to keep the veggies safe from deer, we are basically supplying our dog with free crack cocaine.

Anyone have any bright ideas on a happy medium?